1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for generating and maintaining a software development environment in the distributed information processing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, generation of an environment for developing or programming software required a display of a list of software for supporting development (hereinafter to be referred to as tools) to enable a programmer or a user to select the necessary software from this list. Similarly, a list of data to be used is also displayed so that the programmer can select the necessary data from this list.
On the other hand, the recent software development environment not only includes information about hardware, programming tools and data to be used by the tools, but also a variety of information such as information which defines development procedures, information which defines work menu definitions for a programmer to start tools based on contents of work, information which defines a system of a document to be produced, information for managing a structure of a result of software programming and the progress of programming, etc. Accordingly, in programming new software, it is necessary to generate the development environment for efficiently using the set of information and to manage the development project.
However, according to the conventional method of generating a development environment or an environment for programming software, a programmer was required to select tools for supporting programming and data, one by one. If there is a large amount of information to be selected there is a problem in that a tool to be incorporated has not been selected. Even if all the selected tools have been incorporated, some of them are not used at all in some programming procedures. Thus resulting in an inefficient generation of a suitable development or programming environment.
Further, when a hardware configuration and definition information of a programming environment is changed after the programming environment is once set, the programming environment needs to be reset to match the new status. Since the tools and data have to be selected one by one, the resetting work is troublesome.
As a method for automatically matching the operating system to a change of a hardware configuration, there is a "system generating system" which is disclosed in Japanese Patent document JP-A-H3-19023. This system, however, does not check whether the tools and data match the new hardware configuration and does not automatically install the tools and data which match it. Therefore, this system also has a problem that it is necessary to reset the development or programming environment as is the case with the above-described conventional method.
There is an increasing tendency wherein software development work is distributed and it is desirable that a system is to be built up which enables each programming station to generate its own tools and which also enables each station to refer to information of other stations. There is, however, a problem that the above-described conventional technique can not meet these requirements.